Month: April 2013

Some excellent points raised by Carol Phillips in her post The Hostile Brand Strategy on Branding Strategy Insider. I’ve said for some time that the middle market is the muddle market – and that a more polemic approach by brands is, in my view, inevitable.

The purpose of a face-to-face pitch is only partly to make the case for why you should be hired. The other part, the bigger part in my view, is that you’re looking to see behind the corporate face and to gauge the likelihood for mutual respect and profitability. Reciprocity. And in that sense, a pitch is always a two-way process – you’re judging whether you’re interested in doing business with them as much as they are judging their interest in you. You should be watching – as much as you are being watched. So many people forget that a pitch is a conversation not a monologue – and every good conversation is an interview by another name. By that I mean that you are looking to find out as much about what’s happening in their world as they’re prepared to tell you. And you’re looking to tell the person you’re talking to as much as they want to know, as honestly as you can. Listen carefully to what is said – and pay close attention …

By Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1. The future that we now see for the organisation 2. How we discovered that we needed to change 3. How quickly we need to change 4. Why we need to make changes at that pace 5. How the new vision changes what the organisation intends to achieve 6. Where our new priorities lie 7. How this will change the ways we behave 8. How this will change the ways we compete 9. How this will change the ways we work 10. How this will change the ways you work 11. How we will now judge success 12. What we think the chances of success are 13. What we will be doing to stack the odds in our favour 14. Where we will be looking to make changes first 15. How far changes will extend …

Perhaps you’ve seen this video about the power of words, perhaps not. The storyline itself may have been attributed to David Ogilvy, nevertheless, it is a powerful story that offers critical insights into how we should think about words and their influence in this age of storytelling. The clear intention is to demonstrate that changing the words in a context can change their impact significantly, even if the message and the intention of the message remains largely the same. “I once read that a word is like a living organism, capable of growing, changing, spreading, and influencing the world in many ways, directly and indirectly through others,” wrote Professor Susan Smalley in a deeply thoughtful post titled The Power of Words. “…As I ponder the power of the word to incite and divide, to calm and connect, or to create and effect change, I am ever more cautious in what I say and how I listen to the words around me.” Marketers should be equally aware of what they think they are saying and the …

People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, particularly if their viewpoints compromise the personality of the brand itself. Hands up if you’ve ever been to this meeting: “I like orange.” Or “Don’t make it orange.” “Use short words.” Or “People don’t read.” “We need to be on TV.” And/or “We need to export.” Brands thrive when they are based on meaning, trust, relevance and delight – but of course they must deliver that meaning, trust, relevance and delight to the buyer, not the seller. Otherwise they risk narcissism. Every brand must pursue a life of its own – not affirm the life of a manager. And to me, that integral sense of being an asset in its own right hangs on ten things. A brand must have: …

According to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, but interestingly increased the effects of seasonality. However, the actual nature of that seasonality has changed. Pricing now has got nothing to do with how good a product or service is, what it does, what it doesn’t do or where it came from or how many of them there are. Pricing is decided by how much people want something, and the degree to which it is novel and available. Commoditisation, it follows, is also driven not by “market” forces but by desirability forces. Brands that fail to attract a strong price have lost their desirability or that desirability is fading. People then want to pay less not because the product is necessarily worth less, but because consumers want it less, …

It is said that CSR is how companies build their reputation and contribute to helping the world. Cynics suggest that CSR has sprung from a need by corporates to justify what they were doing to the world. Either way, it’s failed to turn things around so far: CSR hasn’t made a material difference to global sustainability; and corporate motives remain the object of widespread suspicion. According to this article by McKinsey, levels of trust in business are below 55 percent in many countries and less than 20 percent of executives in a recent McKinsey survey reported having frequent success influencing government policy and the outcome of regulatory decisions. No-one’s won – the reasons for which I’ve touched on several times, including here and here. A key reason the McKinsey authors suggest is because of the heightened expectations that consumers have of corporate behaviour, and the increasingly ability to scrutinise and critique those behaviours via social media. John Browne and Robin Nuttall give four reasons why CSR has failed to impress: 1. Lack of traction for …

By Mark Di Somma You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing. “Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more established in order to prove oneself. Launching an upstart on the other hand is all about putting a business in play that really challenges what everyone else has accepted as the rules. That’s because a start-up focuses on getting a product or an idea to market, whereas an upstart focuses on an “enemy” (be it an attitude or a standardised approach) and looks to a product or service to change that. Without a business model trained on defying and disrupting the status quo, you are destined to be another player trying to get a footing in another overplayed market. A feature, no matter how beneficial, is not a disruption. If all that stands between you and your competitors is a …

Buyers have convinced themselves that they are entitled to deprive brands and shopkeepers of a degree of the asking price profit in the hunt for a bargain – yet in almost the same breath, they’ll tell you that businesses need to be responsible and to behave ethically and that they shouldn’t take shortcuts that compromise people or safety. But there are prices to pay for things being cheap. In fact, one could go so far as to say that once prices get below a certain point, someone has to suffer. Some of the side-effects are obvious and horrendous: child labour; unsafe working places; the flourishing replica and fake markets; food scandals. Some are less obvious but still telling: the ongoing effects of over-production on environments and economics; the free-fall decline of high street retail in the face of online trade; and declining employment in the retail and service sectors. You don’t have to look far for predictions that retail is about to close its doors. In this interview on Pandodaily, Marc Andreessen says, “Retail guys …